Doll Parts
by AfterTheEulogy
Summary: The 2P female nations decide that they'd like to stir up a bit of trouble in the universe of their regular Hetalian counterparts. Fem America can't be arsed to go in herself, so she sends in her phlegmatic adoptive sister Puerto Rico to integrate herself amongst them to open the path for greater mayhem. After all, it's always the quiet ones who snap the loudest. "Tag. You're dead."
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I own my OCs and don't own Hetalia. Boo.**

Amelia slapped her nail-studded baseball bat against her palm with a soft but audible thwack, uncaring as to the bent shards of metal that dug into her hand as she did so. Eyes narrowed, she levelled a playful glare at the pale, innocuous-looking girl sitting beside her, hands clasped and eyes downcast.

"You ready to show those fuckers some fun?" Amelia asked, throwing a tanned arm around the other girl's shoulders. The gesture, at first glance friendly and innocuous, turned menacing, her hand tightening into the soft material of the shorter girl's sleeve. In response, she tucked an errant tendril of wavy hair that had escaped from one of its tails before shoving Amelia off of her seat, her face never losing its empty mien.

Grumbling, Amelia stood up and brushed away imaginary dirt from the cuffs of her inordinately short cut-offs. "Damn it bitch, what the fuck was that for?" She snapped. Her angry blustering faded as she stared into the other girl's eyes, clear and tranquil as pond water and just as colourless, now reflecting a pale, sickly yellow from the dim light of the bulb swinging overhead. Amelia found herself grinning and jostling the girl in a once again playful manner. "C'mon, it's not so bad, Nadie! Think about it: You get to pave the way for us. It's pretty epic, you gotta admit."

Nadie merely reached up to fiddle with one of the flower-adorned ties holding her long hair back. "Wonderful," she said flatly, plucking one of the petals off as she spoke. It drifted to the ground, small and white, only to be ground beneath the heel of her shoe. Pollen and a cloying perfume breathed into the air, irritating the insides of Amelia's nose, though Nadia herself didn't mind. "Why can't Madison do this, again? Or Basilio? Or you, for that matter?" She questioned.

Amelia folded her arms behind her head, staring up at the water marked ceiling of her living room. "We ain't subtle enough for this espionage shit, you know that. Maddie'll just run in there and start chucking curling stones at everyone's heads, Basilio'll try some weird-ass kulam shit and well, you know me. I'd just tell everyone to sit back, shut the hell up and wait for me to put a bullet between their eyes." She shook her head, short auburn curls bouncing against her shoulders.

"Nope," Amelia said seriously, "we need someone patient. Someone who'll lull them into a false sense of security, make themselves out to be a perfect little princess before she cuts all of them open from cock to chops. And you," she added, tucking a lock of blue-black hair behind Nadie's ear, "are the perfect little manipulator, dirty faker you are."

"She's right you know," Madison agreed, stepping out of the shadows and into the room. Her bright blonde curls drifted behind her as she walked, as though stirred by a non-existent wind. "In order for this to succeed, we need someone who's like water. Water is passive, taking on the colour of its surroundings. We want someone who will blend in, someone who they know next to nothing about, who can make them trust and let their guards down. Then, you can rise up and drown them out."

"How poetic." She would have sighed at the twin glowers that she received, but she lacked the ability to be swayed by threats, and opted instead to favour the sisters with one of her characteristic flat responses. "I understand. Infiltrate their universe, fool them into believing that I am of no threat, slip in a few subtle murders in order to create a sense of chaos and distrust amongst them, then re-open the gate so as to allow the rest of us in," Nadie droned.

Amelia rolled her eyes. "God, do you always have to sound like a fucking robot? How're you gonna blend in with those assholes when you talk like you were taught English by a battery-powered version of Alfred Pennyworth?!"

A third voice cut through the silence. "I for one think she speaks perfectly normally. Just because _you _butcher the English language beyond recognition doesn't mean that the rest of us can't speak like proper ladies," Alice sniffed, smoothing out the creases in her starched white apron.

Ire raised, Amelia jumped up from her chair, baseball bat swinging around in a wide arc, the bent nails missing the English woman's face by centimetres. "You wanna run that around by me again, Miss Itty Bitty Titties?!" She snarled.

Alice, unmoved by her aggressive posturing, merely stuck her nose up in the air, looking the epitome of hauteur as she did so, as if Amelia were a commoner whom gotten blood on her carriage and who had the gall to complain that she'd been trampled. "Better to be a member of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee than a member of the Smug Tub Jugs Club," she said with a toss of her head.

Amelia snorted. "That's rich, coming from the girl wearing a push-up bra." Smirking widely, she stuck out her own chest, which was barely constrained by her knotted midriff top. She gestured towards Madison and Nadia with the hand not clutching the handle of her bat. "Three awesome racks versus your invisitits; don't worry, I'll get you padded inserts and some new self-esteem." Before she could continue with her taunting, Amelia was cut off by the air in front of her rippling like the disturbed surface of a lake just before it rent apart with a soundless screech, ripping open a massive gap that quivered at the edges with a sibilant noise like the spitting hiss of static.

Nadie carefully rose from her seat before grabbing the handle of her black-and-lavender carryon and wheeling it over towards the portal. "It seems that my transport is here."

"No shit Sherlock," Amelia cracked, only to receive a wallop to the back of her head from Alice's broom, who waved her finger in a disapproving manner as though Amelia were an intransigent child

"Language dear," she said silkily, aqua eyes glinting through the fringe hanging in front of them. Amelia scowled and stuck up both of her middle fingers but said nothing.

"Don't forget to kick my goody-goody male self in his dick!" She shouted to Nadie, who ignored her just before stepping through the portal. It closed with a grating clang, like a rusted gate swinging shut, the gasping chasm hanging in the air gradually shrinking in size until it disappeared entirely with a faint pop.

Amelia blew a strand of hair out of her face before voicing the opinion held by the other women in the room. "Those sanctimonious little shit-lickers are so fucked."

As Madison and Alice nodded in agreement, Basilio scurried in, only to catch the toe of his shoe on the carpet and fall flat on his face. "Did my sister leave already?" He asked when he'd pulled himself to his feet.

Alice patted him on the head when she saw his downcast expression. "I'm terribly sorry dear, but Nadie's long gone," she said gently.

"Yeah, you just missed her, Filipino lady-boy," Amelia smirked.

Basilio threw her a dirty look. "When I get free from you-

"Is the day I grow a dick," Amelia interrupted.

"You mean you don't have one already?" Madison said dryly.

Amelia raised her fist up at her younger twin. "Why you little cocks-

Basilio dropped his head into his hands. "Why couldn't I have gone with Nadie?" He mumbled into his palms as the Amelia and Madison began to scream all manner of profanities at one another and Alice attempted to separate the quarrelling sisters by whacking at the two of them with her broom whilst threatening to ground them.

**A/N: OCs and 2P!genderbends are proving to be quite entertaining.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia. I do, however, own the hell out of a creepy porcelain doll whose unblinking glass stare takes something from your soul and leaves behind something…I don't know what it is that it leaves, but it's not pleasant. I…I don't like it…**

The portal spat Nadie out near the edge of a dock. Unfortunately, Alice, who had been the one to perform the spell that conjured it several days ago, had forgotten to add in the proper trajectory. Thus, rather than depositing her on solid ground, the portal dropped Nadie off several meters shy of the dock, resulting in her falling into the ocean, luggage and all.

By the time she made it onto the beach, not only was she sopping wet with her clothes clinging to her like a second skin and her hair tangled from the salt deposits in the water, she'd also somehow managed to lose her duffel bag to the sea, which just so happened to contain her favourite needle gun. The fact that she'd been able to keep her grip on her suitcase was of little comfort to her.

Whilst her expression betrayed not the smallest iota of irritation, the air around her seemed to curdle in on itself, causing the beach goers who'd previously been lounging around on the sand to flee in the opposite direction. Many would later claim that the sand blackened with each step that she took and that every metal object on their person rusted until they crumbled into piles of red-brown dust. Others would go so far as to say that her presence had coincided with the momentary blacking out of the sun.

Whatever phenomena she may or may not have been inadvertently causing, Nadie was indeed quite annoyed, a fact which was only bolstered when a young man with a side swept black fringe similar to her own and bright green eyes ran up to her, dragging a wheeled suitcase behind himself and began to chatter animatedly in a voice that made her want to shove screwdrivers into her ear canals. Nadie's lip curled in disgust. _This _was her Hetalia male equivalent?

This universe's Puerto Rico, however, remained woefully ignorant to the fact that she was in actuality the Mirrorverse version of his opposite sex counterpart, and continued to blather on about some inane tripe that she couldn't be bothered to remember. After nearly five minutes of the unbearable affront to her already poorly maintained sanity that was his voice, Nadie put a thorough end to the one-sided conversation by slipping a poniard out of her left garter and twirling it around her finger. Smirking as realization dawned across his face; she stepped up to him and shoved it in his throat, eyes glinting in satisfaction as the lightweight blade buried itself in up to the hilt. To add insult to injury, Nadie ripped it out of his neck, the sudden removal of the knife resulting in a rivulet of blood erupting from his punctured carotid.

She smiled as he stared dazedly into her eyes, his bewildered blinking slowing down as his eyelids began to droop. Sliding the weapon back into its sheath around her thigh, Nadie's face kept its vacant smile in place, even as she clamped the same hand that had resulted in the injury over the wound to stifle the violent spurts.

"Hands can heal, hands can hurt," she sing-songed as he opened his mouth to scream. The only sound that escaped his throat was a wet gurgle, but she still pressed a hand against his lips anyway, feeling warm blood trickle from them and onto her palm, then down the length of her wrist to land with a gentle patter on the sand.

By chance he looked down, his eyes widening until they looked like they might burst from his sockets when he caught sight of the white sand blossoming red. "It almost looks like a rose pattern, doesn't it?" Nadie said conversationally, as though she weren't standing there watching him slowly bleed out. She clicked her tongue when he didn't respond except to claw at her hand.

"Now, now, that's just impolite," she chided, shoving two of her fingers into the gaping wound in his neck and twisting them around, feeling the rapidly slowing pulse of his ruined artery throbbing against her hand. More blood spilled out, terrifyingly fast, trickling down his shirtfront like spilled ink. He attempted to scream as she withdrew her fingers, slick with blood, but her palm was still pressed against his lips, the only sound escaping them a muffled whimper.

Almost lovingly, Nadie brushed her cheek against his, wan porcelain against his healthy tan, eyelashes fluttering in a delicate butterfly kiss. "Shh," she whispered, and for a moment, he almost seemed to take comfort from her feigned compassion. "It'll be all over soon."

And it was. He stopped struggling; fell forward into her arms slack as a puppet whose strings have been cut, arms dangling limply at his sides and eyelids falling heavily over his glassy eyes.

Nadie watched, watched as once vivid eyes, verdant as the fronds of the palm tree swaying in the breeze just a short distance away grew dim, as though an internal light switch had been flipped off. Watched intently as their gleam grew fainter as his body lost its tentative grip on his soul, dimming into darkness. Watched as his grip slackened and finally lost its hold entirely, the light in his eyes flickering like the flame of a dying candle before it was snuffed out entirely. A body emptying its entire supply of blood wasn't as quick as many would believe, and it was several minutes later that he finally slumped, his knees giving way as the last remnant of life dribbled out of him and onto the sand.

She removed her bloodied hand from his neck, the violent spray from earlier now reduced to a steadily subsiding trickle. Wiping her hand against his shirt, she gazed once more into his now lifeless eyes, partially covered by his half-lowered lids. Smiling once more, she lifted him into her arms as she stepped towards the shore, laughing softly as the surf sprayed into her face, introducing a familiar brackish scent that momentarily overpowered the cloyingly metallic reek hanging in the air.

"Quite a pity that you can't enjoy it as well," she said wistfully to the boy lying slack in her grip. Then, she grinned, albeit wryly. "Actually, you probably will be smelling the ocean far more than is comfortable when you revive," Nadie added. With that, she unzipped her carryon and pulled out an axe and a coiled length of rope. The former was generally used to cut apart large sections of wood, but it would work just as well on bone.

Less than an hour later, she sighed and wiped her brow, gazing in satisfaction at her handiwork. All of his limbs had been separated from his torso and placed in a burlap sack weighted down with rocks, with his trunk having been given similar treatment. Nadie wasn't sure what the laws of this universe were in regards to national personifications, but she had decided that it was better to be safe than sorry, hence why she'd taken care to remove his eyes from their sockets. She'd even placed them in a mason jar for posterity; they were a rather lovely colour, after all. Vaguely, she wondered if they would grow back when he came back to life before shrugging. She'd suffered plenty of eye losses in her lifetime from friend and foe alike, and each and every time they'd reformed so she had no reason to doubt that his wouldn't.

"Hmm, if his regenerative abilities are the same as mine that probably means that the flesh of his fingerprints and his teeth will grow back as well," she muttered. "Oh well, at least he won't be able to pull himself back together by himself." Sighing once more, she grabbed the sacks and with a strength that one would never suspect given her diminutive height, flung them into the distance. They sailed for a distance of nearly fifty meters before landing with a heavy splash into the water, at which point, weighted down as they were, they began to rapidly sink beneath the current, the only thing to mark the boy's watery grave a patch of scarlet. Soon enough, that too disappeared, replaced by a spot of sea foam.

Wiping her hands off with a monogrammed handkerchief, Nadie inspected the blood stains and bits of fragments littering the sand from her grisly feat and then looked down the front of her vest, which was similarly marred. "I suppose that I have a bit more cleaning up to do," she deadpanned.

**A/N: And to think that I was originally going to label this as humour. **


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: Still don't own Hetalia.**

She'd barely finished removing the blood stains from her vest when Nadie caught sight of mussed blond hair featuring a wayward curl sticking up from the side in the distance. Her eyes thinned into slits as she took in the cheerful demeanour and jaunty step, memorized from months of studying his files.

"Hello Alfred," she said politely when he'd come near enough to greet her. Nadie quirked her eyebrows when she saw the odd, almost disconcerted look that flitted across his face. "Something the matter?"

Grinning in a lopsided manner, Alfred shook his head. "Nah," he assured her. "I just wasn't expecting you to look so different from Nataniel, y'know? Ever since I heard about this whole gender exchange program, I was figuring that our girl selves would look exactly like us, except with, you know, boobs."

Nadie shrugged, inwardly bemoaning her lack of foresight in adjusting her appearance to better suit that of the man she'd just disposed of. "Well," she said lightly, "you know how these things are. Little details like hair and eye colour tend to get muddled in the grand scope of things." _Dear God that is the stupidest sentence to have ever left my mouth. Please buy it, please buy it, please-_

"True that," Alfred said, and Nadie gave an internal cheer.

_Sold_, she thought to herself. Her internal spiel was interrupted by Alfred, who was once again looking at her strangely.

"Not to sound like an asshole or anything, but your eyes…Are they…Okay?" He questioned. "Because you kind of look like you have cataracts or something," Alfred said.

Gritting her teeth, Nadie slipped her hand into her pocket, running her fingers against the taser that she always kept inside of it.

"Are we going to stand here playing twenty questions for the rest of the day, or am I allowed to go home after several hours of interrogation?" She asked tonelessly, feeling a wave of satisfaction wash over her as Alfred's face registered shock at her abrupt change in tone. "Oh, no more questions? Lovely," she continued, grabbing the handle of her suitcase.

Nadie began to trudge in the direction of where her house was located in her universe, figuring that, if anything, she and this world's Puerto Rico would at least share the same residence, but was stopped by Alfred promptly dashing her hopes.

"You're going in the wrong direction, uh," he called, fumbling when he remembered that she'd never given him her name.

"Nadie, and if you would be so kind as to point me in the proper direction, that would be excellent," she said curtly.

Alfred ran a hand through his hair, still looking rather confused at her cold, imperious manner. "Well, Nat lives in La Perla, so you might wanna-He was cut short by Nadie's disgust-laced response.

"What?" She said in a soft, strained voice.

"Nat lives in La Perla. He's been there for the past year, trying to help out with the local's living situation," Alfred explained.

Nadie turned around on her heels in a deliberately slow, almost contortive manner. "Why," she murmured, "would a national incarnation choose to live in a slum overrun with society's trash? What, does his misguided little attempt at charity involve allowing those vultures to mug him on a daily basis so that they can purchase their next fix? Or does he merely denigrate himself in such a way in order to have close access to the disease-ridden prostitutes undoubtedly wandering the streets?" By the time she'd ended her harangue, her face had paled and though she showed no outward expression of anger, no narrowed eyes or raised voice, Alfred could see that her eyes, already nearly transparent in their paleness, had taken on the glacial coldness of ice.

He held up his hands as if to ward off the chill of her gaze. "What the hell's your problem?" Alfred demanded. "You're talking about your own people like they're not worth shit!"

Eyebrows disappearing into her hairline, Nadie once again plunged her hand into her pocket, contemplating whether or not to engage him earlier than she'd planned. "Just because they live on my land does not automatically make them my people; anyone who would degrade themselves in such a manner is no child of mine."

Just like that, with those words, Alfred, notorious for his inability to read a situation, saw that she wasn't Nataniel's Nyotalia counterpart…At least not the _right _one. Nataniel, cheerful, outgoing, flirtatious but utterly dependable and above all, compassionate islander; she was his exact _opposite. _

Eyes wide behind his spectacles, he began to surreptitiously move his hand down to the waistband of his trousers, fingers brushing against the pistol that he always kept there in case of emergency. Good tailoring insured that the bulge was only a few centimetres, barely noticeable, but Nadie had been expecting such a move. Alfred had barely pulled it out of its holster before she'd kicked it out of his hand, sending the gun spiralling away.

"I suppose you're not as stupid as Amelia told me," Nadie droned. "Still fairly stupid though," she added when Alfred turned his back on her to make a mad dash for his gun.

It was easy, too easy, almost, when she tased him, sending him sprawling, twitching and jerking epileptically onto the sand. Which was probably why, despite the introduction of five thousand volts of electricity directly into his sensory and motor nerves, Alfred was still able to gather his bearings in order to punch her with enough force to lift her up off the ground and slam her into a nearby tree.

Pain shot through her back and she heard the snap of the tree's trunk as it cracked down the centre from the impact of her body. Cursing under her breath, Nadie wrenched herself out of the remains of the palm and stumbled a few feet away to grab hold of her elbow and wrench her shoulder back into place. There was the grinding crunch of the bone sliding back into place, followed by a flare of pain that made her stomach spasm with nausea in its intensity. She was so distracted with setting her shoulder that she didn't even notice when Alfred relocated his gun. She did notice, however, when he shoved the muzzle into her forehead, directly between her eyes.

His face was hard, but she could see the callow youth beneath his façade as surely as she could see the trembling of his fingers.

Face still empty of any semblance of emotion, Nadie merely raised her eyebrows. "You're nothing like Amelia, or her counterpart Aaron, for that matter." Her voice was laced with a subtle hint of mockery, each word perfectly pitched, however mildly, to insult. "No," she continued, "you're not even a shadow of them. Either one of them would have pulled the trigger and painted this beach with my brains right now. But _you…_You have me right where you want me, and you won't even take advantage of it. How pathetic."

Alfred shook his head at her words. "Not everyone is like you," he said, and Nadie could hear the words that remained unsaid as surely as if he'd uttered them aloud. _A monster. _The gun jammed harder into her flesh, the cold steel biting into her flesh in a familiar manner, and she found herself musing over when was the last time she'd been held at gunpoint. _Hmm, it's actually been a few years. Odd. _

"What did you do with Nataniel?" Alfred snapped, interrupting her reverie. "You're not the one that was supposed to trade places with him for the month, I know that much. Now tell me what you did to him before I-

"Before you what? You truly think I'm afraid of a bullet?" Nadie stared at him through glazed, half-lidded eyes and Alfred balked at the gleam of serpentine apathy slithering in their depths. "Go ahead. Shoot me."

The trembling in his hand had crawled its way up into the rest of his body, which quivered as though he were receiving an electric shock. "What did you do to him," Alfred whispered in a cracked voice. Eyes wild, the finger wrapped around the trigger began to twitch, although he still made no move to fire it. "What the _fuck _did you do?!"

Nadie smiled a faint, mirthless, barely discernible quirk of her lips as her answer before she reached up to grab the wrist of the hand clutching the gun, shoving it away while her other elbow swung up and then down on the bridge of his nose.

She felt his nose break beneath the blow and she tightened her grip on his wrist to keep it in place so that she could continue to slam her elbow into his face until he finally threw out his other arm to grab her around the wrist in a crushing grip.

"What the hell is wrong with you?!"

Nadie took brief note of the blood dribbling out of his nostrils and down the front of his bomber jacket and the way she could neither get any distance between them nor knock him down. _He's too strong to shake off, but there's only so much damage he can take_, she concluded and, with that thought in mind, drove her knee into his groin. His grip on her wrist faltered from the unexpected move, and she snatched it away, although not after winding it back and delivering a crushing blow to the side of his head. Winding the arm she'd been using to elbow a crack into his face with around Alfred's neck, she began to shove her knee into his ribcage with single-minded focus, repeating the motion until she heard the bones creak before they broke with a wet snap.

As Alfred fell back, he hazarded a punch at her, but his movements, hindered as they were by his broken ribs, were slowed down to the point where Nadie was able to trap his fist with her arm, followed by her promptly throwing her opposite forearm vertically into his elbow, which gave way with a crack. She noticed him looking towards the gun, long since dropped during the scuffle, and, with a sort of bored dispassion, stepped forward to deliver a kick to his abdomen, followed up by another to the side of his right knee that nearly split the bone in half.

He was proving to be made of harder stuff than Amelia had told her, because although she felt the bone quivering when her foot struck it, it held, and Alfred managed to remain standing, albeit somewhat shakily. It was almost impressive.

Spitting up a glob of blood onto the sand, Alfred drew a hand across his mouth before letting out an almost inhuman roar and charging toward her. Taking in his sloppy technique and entirely unguarded stance, Nadie shook her head over how weak these Hetalia worlders were in comparison to those from her universe. True, she thought as she twisted aside to let his haphazardly thrown punch graze off of her previously injured shoulder, which flared with pain from just the glancing blow, Alfred had tremendous physical strength. But he lacked the _desire_ to kill, had too many qualms about taking life. Hell, he even seemed squeamish about incapacitating her, had looked horrified with himself when he'd first sent her flying into the tree.

As she grabbed his now extended arm to brace it with her own and slam her other down on it, breaking it at the elbow just like his right and rendering him essentially crippled, Nadie shook her head again, only dimly aware of the ragged howl that tore past his lips. _Even the most unstable of them are hardly a threat in comparison to their Mirrorverse selves_, she thought dismally. _How dull. No wonder Amelia sent me in to rouse the rabble; anyone else would have died of boredom. _

Kicking Alfred aside, she glanced down at his injuries with a sort of clinical detachment, taking note of the awkward angle of his arms and right leg. His nose, she noted, was off-kilter and had begun to swell, while his eyes were already beginning to take on the characteristic panda-like appearance that so often accompanied a basal skull fracture; apparently, she'd torn his meninges when she'd broken his nose.

Noticing her looming over him, Alfred attempted to crawl away, only to be stopped by Nadie straddling his chest. He began to thrash around in an attempt to buck her off but was quickly stopped by her standing up only to bear her foot down on his broken knee.

Once he'd finished screaming, she dropped down into a crouch beside him, arms folded around her knees. "Now that I've immobilized you, I'm also going to have to remove your memories of this event. I can't have you warning everyone about my presence and what have you, after all," she said conversationally. Pulling herself to her feet, Nadie sidled over to her suitcase, unzipping it to reveal what appeared to be the contents of an army surplus store, although oddly enough, rather than choosing from the plethora of more orthodox weapons, she instead pulled out what appeared to be a scalpel with a cylindrical blade.

Holding the peculiar-looking tool up, Nadie absently patted Alfred on his much-abused knee, oblivious to how he bit down on his lip to keep from screaming. "This here is a trephine," she explained. "It's a surgical instrument designed for obtaining a cylindrically shaped core of bone that can be used for tests and bone studies, cutting holes in bones or for cutting out a round piece of the cornea for eye surgery. In your case, I'll be boring a hole into your skull." Rummaging around in the carryon with her free hand, she pulled out a hypodermic and a small vial of colourless liquid. "Ethanol," she informed him, shaking the vial as she did so. "Oh, I forgot to elaborate on the fact that 'removing your memories' means 'giving you an impromptu lobotomy."

Alfred opened his mouth to scream once more, but Nadie, prepared for that particular contingency, promptly clamped a hand over his mouth. "Scream and I'll cut your larynx out with a butter knife," she deadpanned.

Looking into her eyes, flat and dead as a shark's, Alfred could see plainly that she wasn't bluffing, and so he reluctantly opted to grit his teeth instead.

Nadie gave him an almost amused look. "Your bravado is admirable, but believe me when I say that I wouldn't derive any pleasure from your screams. Vague annoyance, yes; pleasure, no. This is all just duty for me at best and a way of passing the time at worst, I assure you." She offered another faint, lackadaisical smile as she began to fill the hypodermic with ethanol. "Don't worry, I'm skilled enough at this that you'll be recognizing basic shapes and colours just minutes after I'm done," she assured him. "After a few hours, you'll have everything back but your recollection of these events."

Flicking the syringe, Nadie pushed down on the plunger of the hypodermic, expelling a small amount of the contents out in a shimmering arc and onto the sand. Setting it down beside her, she turned the trephine in her hands several times before pressing it against his temple. "I didn't happen to bring any anaesthetic with me, local or otherwise, so you might feel a pinch. If it's any comfort to you, you're getting me at my utmost capability; the last time I performed one of these, I had to scoop out the woman's eye before tunnelling in through the socket. Now, which side do you prefer I go in through, the right or the left?"

**A/N: For the record, my knowledge regarding lobotomies is more than minimal but less than maximum. Let's just pretend that in the world of this story, they can be done with enough efficiency to only destroy certain memory banks whilst leaving everything else intact and the patient perfectly well upon regaining consciousness. You know, besides the whole having a chunk of their memories missing. Anyway, this should regain some semblance of a plot soon. Maybe. **


End file.
